Wow, thanks for that info! Good to know it's a bad place to be. I'm not familiar, where is it located?
Parchman Mississippi.
Delta region. Kinda in the central northish east side of the state near the river. Picked as the site for the prison because of the rich soils there, where historically cotton grew well and inmates formed chain gangs to work the soil and harvest the cotton.
Here's a great article on NPR.org about what historically has gone on at Parchman, along with the new problems that supermax has caused:
Almost every inmate in isolation will be released back into the public one day. But there are a few prison officials who are rethinking the idea of isolation and wondering if there might be a better way.
One of them is Don Cabana (by the way, I know Cabana as he was a colleague of mine in the university system--great guy, anti-DP, but was a firm hand as prison warden). He began his career in corrections the way most people did 30 years ago in the South: On the back of a horse, a shotgun in one hand and 100 prisoners below him, picking cotton.
The inmates were prisoners at a place called Parchman, a prison deep in the farmlands of Mississippi.
"Parchman was like any other prison: Nobody ever cared about it or cared what went on there," Cabana says. "And there's no question inmates were beaten and abused. I would go so far as to say some were probably even murdered."
Locking Down a Lawless Prison Environment
For almost a century, Parchman was notoriously violent. It was known as a place where inmates did hard time. By the time Don Cabana became warden in 1981, things had changed at Parchman. Much of the prisoner abuse had subsided, but there were new problems.
It was overcrowded, underfunded and full of bored, violent inmates the result of an explosion in gangs and drug crime. Assaults on staff were increasing. Instead of worrying about the guards killing the inmates, Cabana says he worried about the inmates killing his guards.
"I had three officers stabbed one morning by one inmate," he says, "and the only reason he stabbed them is because he was trying to elevate his status in the Aryan brotherhood. Damn near kills all three of them. You know, you take your staff being injured by these people very personally, because you feel like you have failed somehow. And a warden's worst nightmare is losing a staff person."
For Cabana, that was the last straw. He pulled the inmate into his office and shut the door.
"I sat there and I said, 'Well, Bubba. I tell you, you've made it to the big time,'" Cabana says, describing his conversation with the inmate. "'Are you prepared for all the benefits?' And he said, 'Well, like what?' And I said, 'I'm going to lock this place down so tight and so long that you'll never see the sunshine. And you see, I'm going to do it to a thousand inmates in here, not just you.'"
That's just what Cabana did. He looked at states including California, Arizona and Illinois and saw they were creating a new place to put bad inmates: 1,000-bed, high-tech isolation units known as Supermax prisons. That meant 23 hours a day in a cell, one hour alone in an exercise pen. No television, no contact with the outside world, nothing but a concrete cell.
SO MUCH MORE at this link... by the way, Don is no longer Warden. Chris Epps is--an African American man, and a firm hand who had mighty huge shoes to fill when Don left....
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5587644
JMO/IMO
